How can #God redeem my excessive nostalgia?

 I don’t know about you, but we had an extraordinarily quiet Christmas this year.  For the past several years, Christmas vacation was filled with cousins playing, skiing, endless noise and activity.  For us, and many others, this year was different.  Not only do we have less family around but less activities in general.  Now, quiet isn’t all bad.  I’ll admit, it is nice to breathe and actually have a vacation, but as I looked into my son’s longing eyes, not sure what to do with all of this free time after Christmas, I revisited the true grief I sometimes feel when I recall my own childhood Christmases. 

Now, I realize that many do not have good Christmas memories.  While many have harsh remembrances of discord, divorce, or alcohol abuse, my childhood Christmases were truly magical: our basement packed with cousins on the floor and the fold out couch, my one cousin who roused us all at 3 am every year to say that Santa had come, filling two rows at the movie theater on Christmas night, late night games of spades, marathon shopping for sales, and not a moment of discord, even with 9 cousins in one house.  Those times were really little pieces of heaven in a fallen world.

But as we all know, nothing lasts forever this side of eternity.  Grandparents pass away, cousins grow up and have families of their own, people move, and sadly, families grow apart, and apparently, pandemics can rise up unexpectedly.  I have always been excessively nostalgic, never wanting anything to change.  But no matter how I want things to stay the same, they don’t.  Why else would Moses tell us, “ He (God) will never leave you or forsake you . . “ (Deuteronomy 31:8) or Malachi report, “I the Lord do not change: therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed” (Malachi 3:6), or Paul promise “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8)?  Apart from God, nothing stays the same.

Especially in 2020, we are painfully aware of the constant state of change. As a person who tends toward depression, change is painful, a burden I wish I didn’t have to bear.  Recently, however, I heard an illustration that changed my perspective, and I finally saw the redemptive message in the darkness of nostalgia.  My friend’s daughter was called home from her friend’s house.  She came home bummed out saying, “I wish I could stay and play forever.”  My friend told her, “We were created for good things to last forever, but because of sin, we can only have small glimpses of heaven.  One day we can enjoy eternal joy in heaven forever.”  Wow.  After spending a few minutes wondering if I had ever imparted even close to that kind of wisdom to my own children, I slowly began to realize how God can use my nostalgia to draw me to him instead of pull me into despair.

Maybe this feeling of wanting great heaven-like moments to stay the same are a picture of what God intended for us in the first place.  Maybe we are meant to long for the Eden-like relationships characterized by complete vulnerability with God and others.  Maybe when those brief moments of closeness and harmony are disrupted or come to an end, God is reminding us that this world is not our home, that we are to mourn the absence of that intimacy and expectantly long for our true home in eternity with him.

I don’t know about you, but I am ready to end my love-hate relationship with nostalgia, treating it as this heavy load I am doomed to bear.  For so many of us, our lives are so comfortable, so easy and predictable, we often forget to mourn this broken world and long for the reconciliation only heaven holds. So, this year, when we aren’t quite so comfortable, when our lives are much less predictable, may we joyfully cling to Jesus’ words, “Let not your hearts be troubled.  Believe in God, believe also in me.  In my father’s house are many rooms.  If that were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (John 14: 1-3). 

Lord, forgive me for wallowing when my excessive nostalgia wants circumstances to stay the same.  Please use my nostalgic thoughts to point me to your life-giving promises of reconciliation and eternity with you.